text:
Flattening the School Walls
Principal Tom Horn, a self-described "hippie kid from Eugene," has transformed a troubled alternative high school in Oregonnot to mention his teachers' job descriptionsby introducing a radical project-based learning model.
Tom Horn, rugged and composed in a fleece jacket, hiking boots, and a baseball cap, points down at the several rows of winter vegetables in planter boxes. "We already harvested three and a half tons of food for the community from this garden," says the principal of Al Kennedy, an alternative public high school in Cottage Grove, Ore. He gestures to the neglected soccer field beyond. "But pretty soon the garden will extend all the way out there." Standing nearby, Maggie Matoba, the school's garden coordinator and founder of a local nonprofit that provides horticultural therapy, shrugs and smiles. This sort of lofty planning from Horn is nothing new to her.
In a sense, the garden project can be seen as a metaphor for the way Horn operates in every aspect of his job as a school leader. The 42-year-old principal is equal parts quixotic and practical. He thinks big—dashing off seemingly far-fetched ideas with tangled webs of text and arrows in his ever-present sketchbook. He then gets others excited about a project, convinces some experts to get involved, procures the resources—and watches the project bloom.
By many measures, Horn's leadership style—and his emphasis on beyond-the-classroom learning—appears to be working. The attendance rate at the 100-student high school, formerly called Al Kennedy Alternative School but now referred to by students and staff as the Kennedy School of Sustainability, has jumped from 23 percent in the fall of 2006, when Horn took over, to a current rate of about 90 percent. The dropout rate is now at 12.5 percent, down from 20 percent in 2004-05. Test scores, though still below par, are on the rise. The once-stigmatized alternative school now has a 180-student waiting list. And for the first time ever, students from Kennedy are going to college.
A self-described "hippie kid from Eugene," Ore., Horn claims that he never actually wanted to be a principal. In his mid-20's, he gave up a nomadic existence of surfing and rock-climbing to head back to school. He then opted for a master's degree simply to move himself up the teacher pay scale, and at age 30, became a special education teacher—a position he was happy to stay in. But several years later, persistent urging from Krista Parent, superintendent of Oregon's 2,900-student South Lane School District, who'd heard of Horn's reputation as an innovator, convinced him to apply for the principalship and, eventually, to take on the task of turning the ailing Kennedy around.
Parent, the 2007 National Superintendent of the Year, says she envisioned transforming Kennedy from an alternative school for students who had "blown out of the regular system" to an option for "kids who need more real-world relevant kinds of opportunities." Under Horn and the teacher team he's assembled, she notes, the school has "far exceeded our expectations and our vision—and more quickly than I thought it could be done."
A Unique Curriculum
Horn recalls showing up on the first day of school in a suit and tie only to be cursed out by students smoking cigarettes and what smelled like marijuana near the front door. Within his first two months, several students experienced crystal methamphetamine and cocaine overdoses. Horn took time to visit the trailer parks his students lived in and saw what he describes as "abject poverty." Once a thriving mill town with well-paid jobs that did not require a high school diploma, Cottage Grove was now economically downtrodden. It dawned on Horn that finishing school would be even more important for these students than it had been for previous generations in the rural town.
Horn determined that the students needed a unique curriculum to keep them engaged and in classes. Because of the natural resource-rich surrounding area as well as his own interest in green technology, he chose project-based learning and the theme of sustainability. He divided students into five cohorts, each of which would complete projects related to a subtheme—agriculture, energy, forestry, architecture, or water.
All of the projects were aimed at having "tangible positive effects on the entire community," he explained. "We've flattened the walls of the school." Since many Kennedy students had been demoralized in the traditional school system, Horn hoped getting kudos from community members might help restore their feelings of self-worth. In addition, he figured, the projects themselves, visible in the surrounding neighborhoods, could serve as a source of pride.
The cohort design, in which students remain with the same teacher all day, is perhaps Kennedy's most unusual trait. The model gives teachers complete autonomy with their schedules. "You never know when [students] will take off like fireworks and get excited about something," says Vickie Costello, who teaches the water cohort. Having a static group "allows me to extend a lesson or end it and come back to it the next day and get them up and active. So many lessons lend themselves to being outside." According to Horn, "the model is a mixture of elementary school and a master's cohort."
The fluid schedule also lets teachers take students on day trips to Portland or extended trips of up to two weeks—for example, to go snow camping or exploring the Oregon coast. (All teachers at Kennedy, in addition to being dually certified to comply with highly-qualified teacher regulations, are licensed bus drivers.) The trips are closely tied to themes students are studying in class. "Sometimes we listen to a book on the CD player on the bus," says Costello, who has been at Kennedy a year longer than Horn. "I ask questions and we have a discussion about it."
In addition to going on regular out-of-school study excursions, students spend one day a week doing field work for their thematic projects. One group is growing tilapia (freshwater fish) as an energy-efficient protein source for the community. Another cohort is building Aleutian kayaks and taking them out to monitor the river's water quality. Students are also doing beekeeping, pulling invasive species of plants from the riverbank, and working on sustainable housing prototypes. While there are only five full-time teachers and four instructional aides at the school, Horn has assembled close to 60 community volunteers to lend their hands and expertise to the various projects. Funding for the projects comes mainly in the form of grantsHorn has secured $3 million in grants from places such as the University of Oregon and the U.S. Forest Service in the last six years.
Extreme Teaching
The teachers at Kennedy have an extraordinary—even potentially overwhelming—amount of responsibility. In addition to the overnight trips and projects that require much out-of-school planning, they are working with a demanding population: According to Horn, 38 percent of Kennedy students are homeless, 14 percent are teen parents, many have dealt with addiction issues, and all are at risk of dropping out. The school has a full-time counselor, but teachers need to be tuned into students' mental health and emotional needs, too.
All of Horn's staff members—some of whom he hired, others of whom stayed on from the previous administration—are willing to go above and beyond the conventional teacher job description. "There isn't a weak link," Horn says. "It's serendipitous." But in truth, the staff's dedication is far from a matter of luck. Some former teachers at the school self-selected out once Horn came onboard with his outsized ideas, and Horn himself screens new candidates for dedication to the model and the students. "The passion that each teacher brings to their work as an educator at Kennedy comes from an understanding that learning should be a fascinating adventure," he says. Not surprisingly, his teachers are all outdoor enthusiasts like himself—skiers, surfers, and snowboarders, among other things.
Horn also creates staff cohesion by using a democratic decision-making process. "Not a decision is made here that doesn't involve everyone's voice and opinion—which is really hard," says Horn, who meets with his staff twice a week. "But when we solidify the notion of what we're doing, there's 100 percent commitment." Costello says the democratic process has been critical to her experience at Kennedy. "I can't imagine working somewhere else without it," she says. "It's empowering and motivating. And it keeps evolving."
Standard Operating Procedures
One question local school board members and other school visitors often ask is how the teachers address state standards within projects. Parent, the district superintendent, notes it's something she and Horn regularly confer about. "One of the criticisms of the old alternative high school, and any alternative school, is that the standards have been watered down," she notes. "You lower the bar and that's how kids are successful there. We had to fight that perception and make sure the rigor was present."
Horn describes project-based learning as "working down Bloom's taxonomy instead of up." The students are given a task that requires higher-order thinking skills—often to create something—and they must learn and practice lower-level skills along the way. Whether or not students realize it, the standards are embedded into the projects from the start. Horn and his teachers map out each project on a matrix, with the content subjects on the horizontal and phases of the project on the vertical. The state standards are embedded in the boxes. For instance, a student doing beekeeping might need to research and write a paper on bee behavior to address a language arts standard. The overall goal of completing a project that will benefit the community motivates kids, according to Horn, and is an "entry point for reshaping their love of learning."
In most alternative schools, where students have fallen behind academically due to behavioral and social problems, the focus is remediation. "We do this weird thing with setting benchmarks before we let students do something fun," says Horn. At Kennedy, by contrast, teachers' first concern is engagement—keeping kids in school. "You get kids hooked on personal interest," says Costello. "You give them articles to read and they don't realize they're doing language arts." In many cases, a student "comes to the realization they are lacking skills they need," says Horn, which acts as an intrinsic motivator.
Teachers do address students' individual academic needs as well. Students take a battery of assessments three times per year to determine their basic skill levels, and teachers set aside time for individual interventions based on those results. For math, some students participate in online digital lessons through Khan Academy, a provider of free video tutorials. According to Costello, Kennedy is "more student-centric [than other schools]. Every student has an individualized plan—not just the special ed. students. We look at their assessments and what they need."
Marcus West, a 17-year-old student who recently transferred to Kennedy, says he appreciates getting personalized attention. "The teachers actually work with me and show me things hands-on," he explains. "I'm getting help with the classes I need instead of just getting pushed toward the back."
The school still has a ways to go to meet state benchmarks and adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law. According to data from the Oregon Department of Education, 52 percent of Kennedy students passed the state reading assessment for grades 10 and 11 in 2011. While that's much higher than Kennedy's 2008 pass rate of 9 percent, it's well below the state average of 83 percent. The school's writing scores have been up and down over the years and are currently at a 28 percent pass rate.
The area students "haven't progressed as well in is math," says Parent. "Math is so sequential, with pretty big gaps in these students' education that's a little bit harder for us. We've got work to do in that area." But while Kennedy's pass rate in grades 10 and 11 is low in math—36 percent—it's double the pass rate from 2010 (the only one available for comparison).
Dana Beck, program manager for Oregon GEAR UP, a federally funded program that works to get low-income students into college, says Kennedy—the only alternative school the organization works with—is making "impressive" gains. "I think there's still room for growth and still room for them to adapt in their model to better meet testing requirements, but we're seeing positive trends, and that's a really good sign" she notes.
Costello is also optimistic about the growth she's seen in the last six years. "Not only are test scores moving up but interest in community college is increasing," she says. According to Horn, between dual enrollment and postsecondary matriculation, as many as 40 percent of Kennedy students and recent graduates have enrolled in college in the last few trimesters.
Growth Models
As progressive as his approaches may seem, Horn fastidiously roots his work in research and best practices. He's a proponent of the 5 Dimensions of Teaching and Learning, an instructional framework developed by the University of Washington's Center for Educational Leadership. He is also a devotee of the practice of "instructional rounds," based on the work of a group of professors at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in which teachers observe their colleagues and compare their own practices to what they see. Horn's explanations about his work and school are peppered with the names of authors, philosophers, and entrepreneurs who inspire himDaniel Pink, Will Allen, Angela Duckworth, and Alice Waters, among others.
Horn is also emphatic that the work being done at his small school can be replicated in larger high schools—albeit with a bit of restructuring. "You take the traditional high school and put Kennedy into that school. That's the replicability—it's a school within a school." The smaller school communities, which might be developed around themes to "build cohesion," could be led by teacher leaders, says Horn. The charter school movement has bred innovative school models, he adds, but districts should also look to bring project-based learning to alternative and comprehensive high schools.
The big-picture project of spreading his model is on the horizon: Horn will be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary and is slated to give a TED Talk. But the principal takes time with the more immediate issues as well—for example, sitting down for a hot cup of tea with a defiant student or finding a way to build a weight room for his athletes. These day-to-day smaller responsibilities seem to keep him grounded. "It all sounds really wonderful, but it's still growing," he says. "We're ironing out the difficulties."
Web Only
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.


text:
It must be a state of mind thing for all Whovians. You look around you, at the world in which you live, and some things start to look a bit familiar. Phone boxes, no matter what color, have a certain TARDISiness about them. Penlight torches feel a bit sonicy. And Daleks start to crop up EVERYWHERE, like the Ikea soap dispenser Dalek above.
So here are eight other ordinary items that have something of the Skaronian about them, and then a scary building at the end:
2: Conference Pears
In this picture, I like to imagine the standing-up pear is an outraged Dalek that has just come across a fallen comrade, and is determined to avenge the needless slaughter (even if it was to make a fruit salad).
3: A Wet/Dry Vaccuum Cleaner
Extraordinarily R2-D2-ish, this cleaner, isn't it? But if you put an eyestalk on him and attach his nozzle, watch out!
5: Flour Shakers
Granted, the handle on this thing makes it look like a Dalek poking itself in the eyestalk, or possibly standing with its hand on its hip. Still, "EX-TER-MI-BAKE," anyone?
5: Taps
These are the kind of Daleks you'd want to see after a hard day's gardening. Speaking of which…
6: Compost Bins
Not just imperious warlike beings with despotic tendancies, but also champions of recycling. Who knew?
7: This Cheesegrater
This is a marketing opportunity waiting to happen. EX-TER-MI-GRATE!
8: A Roll-On Deodorant
How do you suppose Daleks keep fresh after a hard day at war? Especially when they have so many armpits and those metal suits must get quite hot. No wonder people keep running away.
9: A Trashcan
Yeah, EXTERMINATE THAT GARBAGE! EXTERMINATE IT!
10: The Gherkin
Look at it, bearing down on that smaller skyscraper and wishing it had a big blastygun to shoot it with. Remember the big Dalek building on Skaro in Asylum of the Daleks, well its brother has taken a job in the City of London, and won't be coming back for Davrosmas.
Seen any Daleks in your house? Do tell:Read More

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Linen Like Cocktail Napkins
Personalize our top-quality, absorbent Linen Like Cocktail Napkins and give your bar and appetizers the unique luxury they deserve! Complete your wedding signature drinks or graduation beverages with these personalized cocktail napkins. Create from scratch, or customize one of our designer-made styles.
Design Your Own
Shop Our Designs


text:
There's a moment in the history of medicine that's so cinematic it's a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn't just spreading through the culture, though. It's killing the bacteria surrounding it.
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule. And Fleming then discovered that the mold could kill many other species of infectious bacteria as well. "I had a clue that here was something good, but I could not possibly know how good it was," he later said.
No one at the time could have known how good penicillin was. In 1928, even a minor wound was a potential death sentence, because doctors were mostly helpless to stop bacterial infections. Through his investigations into that peculiar mold, Fleming became the first scientist to discover an antibiotic—an innovation that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize. Penicillin saved countless lives, killing off pathogens from staph to syphilis while causing few side effects. Fleming's work also led other scientists to seek out and identify more antibiotics, which collectively changed the rules of medicine. Doctors could prescribe drugs that effectively wiped out most bacteria, without even knowing what kind of bacteria was making their patients ill.
Of course, even if bacterial infections were totally eliminated, we would still get sick. Viruses—which cause their own panoply of diseases from the common cold and the flu to AIDS and Ebola—are profoundly different from bacteria, and so they don't present the same targets for a drug to hit. Penicillin interferes with the growth of bacterial cell walls, for example, but viruses don't have cell walls, because they aren't even cells—they're just genes packed into "shells" made of protein. Other antibiotics, such as streptomycin, attack bacterial ribosomes, the protein-making factories inside the pathogens. A virus doesn't have ribosomes; it hijacks the ribosomes inside its host cell to make the proteins it needs.
We do currently have "antiviral" drugs, but they're a pale shadow of their bacteria-fighting counterparts. People infected with HIV, for example, can avoid developing AIDS by taking a cocktail of antiviral drugs. But if they stop taking them, the virus will rebound to its former level in a matter of weeks. Patients have to keep taking the drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent the virus from wiping out their immune system.
Viruses mutate much faster than bacteria, and so our current antivirals have a limited shelf life. And they all have a narrow scope of attack. You might treat your flu with Tamiflu, but it won't cure you of dengue fever or Japanese encephalitis. Scientists have to develop antivirals one disease at a time—a labor that can take many years. As a result, we still have no antivirals for many of the world's nastiest viruses, like Ebola and Nipah virus. We can expect more viruses to leap from animals to our own species in the future, and when they do, there's a good chance we'll be powerless to stop them from spreading.
Virologists, in other words, are still waiting for their Penicillin Moment. But they might not have to wait forever. Buoyed by advances in molecular biology, a handful of researchers in labs around the US and Canada are homing in on strategies that could eliminate not just individual viruses but any virus, wiping out viral infections with the same wide-spectrum efficiency that penicillin and Cipro bring to the fight against bacteria. If these scientists succeed, future generations may struggle to imagine a time when we were at the mercy of viruses, just as we struggle to imagine a time before antibiotics.
Three teams in particular are zeroing in on new antiviral strategies, with each group taking a slightly different approach to the problem. But at root they are all targeting our own physiology, the aspects of our cell biology that allow viruses to take hold and reproduce. If even one of these approaches pans out, we might be able to eradicate any type of virus we want. Someday we might even be faced with a question that today sounds absurd: Are there viruses that need protecting?
At five a.m. one day last fall, in San Francisco's South of Market district, Vishwanath Lingappa was making rabies soup. At his lab station, he injected a syringe full of rabies virus proteins into a warm flask loaded with other proteins, lipids, building blocks of DNA, and various other molecules from ground-up cells. It cooked for hours on Lingappa's bench, and occasionally he withdrew a few drops to analyze its chemistry. By spinning the fluid in a centrifuge, he could isolate small clumps of proteins that flew toward the edge as the bigger ones stayed close to the center.
To his mix, Lingappa had added a particular protein he wanted to study. He suspected that the rabies virus used this protein in the infected cell to assemble the capsid, or external shell, of replicated viruses. He had tagged the target protein with radioactive atoms, allowing him to follow it as it interacted with other elements in the soup.
At around 10 in the morning, Lingappa took pictures of the mixture. By lunchtime, seven hours into his workday, the images were developed and ready to show off to his staff. In the conference room, a table was strewn with take-out sandwiches, and an abandoned bowl of oatmeal sat on a credenza. As Lingappa held up the films to the light, his colleagues crowded behind him to make out black streaks across the images.
As predicted, the tagged protein had joined with other proteins, creating the microscopic machines that in a real infection would assemble the rabies virus shell. Why would this matter? Because a drug developed by Lingappa's firm, Prosetta Antiviral, has been shown to interfere with this protein, blocking it from functioning in these shell-making machines. If his gamble pays off, this is the pathway by which an antiviral drug will stop cells from replicating the rabies virus. At moments like these, Lingappa's voice swells from its normal, mellow pedagogical tone to a near-talk-radio thunder; he clenches his fist and paraphrases one of his favorite lines from the philosopher John Dewey. "The givens of experience are not given," he says. "They are taken! With great difficulty!"
Man Against Virus —————–
A Brief History
Doctors in India use an early version of vaccination against smallpox, introducing small amounts of dried pus from smallpox sores into the skin of healthy patients.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduces smallpox variolation—direct exposure to dried pus or sores—to England, having witnessed it in Constantinople. Although variolation carries a 2 to 3 percent risk of death, the practice spreads through Europe.
Benjamin Jesty, an English cattle breeder, is credited with performing the first vaccination in history. Jesty had long known that dairymaids didn't get smallpox. He guessed it was because of their exposure to cowpox, a similar disease in cows. Jesty inoculated his wife and children with cowpox, protecting them from smallpox for years.
Edward Jenner, a British physician, publishes the first scientific report of a vaccination experiment using cowpox.
Louis Pasteur invents a vaccine for rabies. It was the first to use a laboratory-weakened strain of the target virus, rather than a related virus like cowpox, to induce immunity.
A Dutch biologist named Martinus Beijerinck searches for the cause of a disease killing tobacco plants. He passes sap from infected leaves through porcelain filters so fine that bacteria can't get through. Yet the sap can still cause healthy tobacco leaves to wilt. He argues that the disease is caused by a tiny agent smaller than a bacterium.
Oxford biologists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain discover how to produce large quantities of antibiotic and test it on humans. Industrial-scale production of penicillin soon begins.
American virologist Wendell Stanley reports that penicillin and other antibiotics have no effect on viruses.
Interferons, antiviral proteins produced naturally by infected cells, are discovered. They are hailed as a potential miracle drug but prove to be risky and unreliable as an antiviral.
William Prusoff of Yale University discovers idoxuridine, the first effective antiviral. It fights herpes by interfering with the assembly of new virus genes. Approved in 1963 by the FDA, it can only be used topically for herpes infections in the eye because of dangerous side effects in other parts of the body.
After screening thousands of compounds for antiviral activity, scientists get a hit: a compound called amantadine proves effective against influenza. It is approved in the late 1960s.
The World Health Organization launches a campaign to eradicate smallpox, which still kills some 15 million people a year.
Researchers discover a broad-spectrum antiviral, which can work against a number of viruses. Known as ribavirin, it is now mainly used against hepatitis C. It's not widely prescribed because it can cause anemia and other side effects.
Acyclovir, an antiviral for herpes viruses, is discovered.
The last known death from smallpox occurs. In 1980, WHO declares its eradication campaign a success. Three decades later, stocks of smallpox still remain in American and Russian laboratories, and there are suspicions that some stocks of virus are unaccounted for. If smallpox were to emerge again, doctors would have no antiviral drug to combat it.
Scientists discover the first antiviral effective against HIV. Known as AZT, it is later joined by a number of other drugs.
AZT-resistant strains of HIV are discovered. Doctors soon begin prescribing cocktails of several different antivirals to slow the evolution of resistance.
Gilead Sciences researchers discover a new antiviral for influenza, marketed as Tamiflu.
Scientists report influenza viruses that are resistant to Tamiflu. Since then, resistant strains have spread around the world.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Merck win FDA approval for highly effective new antivirals for hepatitis C, which infects 170 million people worldwide.
Lingappa came relatively late to his obsession with antivirals. He trained as a cell biologist in the late 1970s in the laboratory of Günter Blobel, a Rockefeller University cell biologist who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1999. Blobel studied how cells work by grinding them up and running experiments on their loose contents. This type of cellular soup, known as a cell-free system, can simulate the inner workings of a cell, including the assembly of new genes and proteins. By adjusting its composition—leaving out a single enzyme, for example—scientists can figure out how a cell's molecules work together to keep it alive. Under Blobel's tutelage, Lingappa became a cellular chef de cuisine in his own right. For example, he ran experiments to figure out how newly made proteins were ferried through a cell to the place where they were needed. After earning his PhD, Lingappa headed west to UC San Francisco to continue his research.
He might have experimented his way to a quiet retirement had it not been for his younger sister Jaisri, who was treating AIDS patients at the UCSF Medical Center. She spent a summer at Rockefeller many years beforehand, at Vishwanath's urging, and now saw that cell-free systems might shed some light on viruses. At the time, the prevailing dogma was that once a host cell made new virus genes, the capsid could self-assemble around them. But Jaisri was skeptical. She suspected that viruses needed help from host enzymes to mold the shell into its proper shape. By experimenting in a cell-free system, she reasoned, she might be able to identify those host enzymes that the virus depended upon—and figure out how to block them. She asked her brother whether there was any chance her idea could work. "I haven't a clue," Vishwanath replied. "Let's try it."
HIV was still dauntingly mysterious at the time, so the Lingappas began their experiments on hepatitis B, a relatively simple virus that scientists already knew a great deal about. They figured out how to get cell-free systems to generate hepatitis B capsids. Next they tinkered with the soup's recipe, taking out various enzymes and observing whether there was any change to the shells it produced. Before long they had found that a number of enzymes were essential to making the capsids. When these enzymes were present, the cell-free system produced perfect shells. Without them the system could manage only stunted, half-formed shells. As the Lingappas had predicted, the capsids could not put themselves together.
They and their colleagues went on to run the same experiments on HIV, and again they found that the viruses needed lots of help. Host enzymes had to join together to form complicated biological machines with the right shape—the right set of pockets, grooves, and clefts—to grab parts of viruses and push them into their proper place to build the shell. For each capsid-making machine, the Lingappas reasoned, there should be a molecule they could lodge in some key pocket, making it useless for hauling capsid proteins into place. The machine would thereby be immobilized, and the infected cell could no longer build viruses.
By 2003, Vishwanath had so much faith in his idea that he retired early from UCSF to launch Prosetta. (Jaisri helped him start the company, but she has remained in academic life, now at the University of Washington.) The first thing researchers at Prosetta had to do was search for promising candidates—molecules of just the right shape to lodge into the capsid-making machinery. They screened 80,000 compounds by testing each of them in a cell-free system. Most of the compounds couldn't stop capsids from forming, but a few dozen did. Instead of focusing on one, Lingappa decided to pursue almost all of them at once on the premise that a victory against any one virus would help Prosetta extend its strategy to all of them.
"We distributed our eggs in every basket conceivable," he says. It was a gutsy strategy, and so far it's paying off. Preliminary studies—in both cell cultures and on animals—are showing that Prosetta's approach can stop rabies, Ebola, influenza, and a number of other viruses. If, as Lingappa suspects, all viruses need help from their host cells to assemble, he may have found a strategy that can work against every virus that could ever make us sick.
Up until now, antiviral drugs have tended to work by interfering with viruses themselves. Consider the case of Tamiflu, our best drug against influenza after infection has already occurred. Tamiflu binds to neuraminidase, a protein on the surface of flu viruses. When new viruses form, they use neuraminidase to pry open a passageway out of their host cell. Tamiflu disables the protein, trapping the flu viruses so that they can't spread to other cells. The shape of the molecule in Tamiflu is exquisitely well matched to the neuraminidase protein on flu viruses, and as a result it can't bind to proteins on the surface of other viruses.
The Tamiflu strategy—targeting the components of individual viruses—can yield effective drugs, but it also has some serious drawbacks. The biggest of these is resistance. Many viruses, such as the flu and HIV, mutate at a blinding pace: a million times faster than our own genome does. Every now and then, one of those mutations will alter the target of an antiviral drug. The drug will have a harder time latching onto the mutant virus, which will then be free to reproduce and flourish unchecked. In 2007, for instance, a mutant form of flu virus emerged that could resist Tamiflu. It had evolved a differently shaped neuraminidase that Tamiflu couldn't grab. So even as governments around the world stockpiled 200 million doses of the drug to prepare for the next great flu pandemic, Tamiflu-resistant strains spread across the world. "It's a game-breaker," says Vincent Racaniello, a Columbia University virologist and the author of the textbook Principles of Virology. "Anything you make, the viruses will become resistant to." (So far in Lingappa's experiments, influenza viruses have failed to evolve resistance to the Prosetta drug. The reason: It's easy for viruses to evolve a new shape that allows them to shake off Tamiflu, but it's difficult—potentially impossible—for them to evolve a way to assemble themselves if their host's proteins won't cooperate.)
Prosetta's approach is so intriguing because it alters our own cellular machinery instead of attacking the virus directly. Roughly speaking, this is the chief insight that animates all of the new strategies for antiviral drugs: They focus on the host instead of the virus. A second approach along these lines would boost our own immunological response to viruses, while a third strategy would take an even more radical step: rewiring our cells to commit suicide when they get infected.
Breaking the Cycle ——————
All viruses replicate in essentially the same way, and the new generation of antiviral drugs aims to disrupt that process at different points. Here's how they work.—C.Z.
Enter Each type of virus has its own unique way of hijacking cells. In the case of influenza, the virus shell contains proteins called hemagglutinin, which bind to the surface of healthy cells and trigger them to open up.
Replicate Once inside, the virus sheds its shell, and its genes worm their way into the cell's nucleus, hijacking the host to copy the viral genes instead of its own. In most cases, as virus genes are copied, they take the form of double-stranded RNA, or dsRNA.
Neutralize cell defense Certain proteins in the cell will sense the dsRNA and trigger the production of antiviral molecules called interferons. But some viruses (including some influenza strains) have evolved counterattacks against the interferon response.
Mature Viruses coordinate dozens of host proteins to become molecular machines, which then assemble the new virus particles. Once each particle matures, it binds to the inner surface of the cell and opens a passageway out. It is now ready to infect a new cell.
A. Trigger Suicide
An artificial molecule called Draco attaches itself to dsRNA, triggering the cell to commit suicide. Because viruses have never been exposed to Draco before, their counterattacks are useless. The infected cells die before the viruses can mature.
B. Amp Up Defenses
Many viruses are programmed to prevent a cell from making its own interferons. By injecting us with synthetic interferons, doctors could trigger an antiviral response—no matter what virus is attacking us.
C. Inhibit Maturation
Prosetta's molecules bind to the proteins that viruses need to create their shells, stopping the maturation process. And because these proteins come together only to make viruses, the drugs should be nontoxic to patients.
That second approach is being spearheaded by Eleanor Fish of the University of Toronto. She and other researchers worldwide are developing drugs that might replace or supplement interferons, our own catchall viral response. Essentially the idea is to accelerate the body's own virus-killing powers. Our cells can sense a viral invasion because of a quirk in the way most viruses replicate: Using the host cell's machinery, they copy their own genes by making a peculiar molecule called double-stranded RNA. So our cells are equipped with proteins whose sole job is to detect double-stranded RNA. When they do, they immediately relay a signal throughout the cell that an intruder has invaded.
The cell then produces a second type of protein, called interferons, which launch a massive counterattack. They in turn trigger the production of more than 300 other kinds of proteins, each with its own role to play in killing viruses. Some of the proteins slice up the virus's genes and wreck its proteins. Others tell the cell to become rigid, making it harder for new viruses to escape. The infected cell also sends interferons to surrounding cells, creating a firebreak that stops the spread of the infection. "The very first response to a virus—whether it's a respiratory infection, whether it's a virus that gets into your gut, whether it gets into a skin tear—our very first response is an interferon response," Fish says. But our natural defenses are far from perfect: Viruses often replicate fast enough to keep ahead of the interferon patrol, and certain kinds of viruses, such as influenza and SARS, make proteins whose sole job is to shut down interferons. Since the 1990s, some natural interferons have been approved for use against certain viruses (hepatitis C, for example), but their track record has been disappointing: They work in some patients and not others, they can cause toxic side effects, and they are expensive, delicate drugs.
So Fish and other groups of scientists are trying to build a drug that would do the interferons' job better. By tacking on polyethylene glycol—a cluster of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms—they've created synthetic interferons that last days instead of hours and will wipe out hepatitis C viruses completely in up to 81 percent of treated patients, depending on the strain. During Toronto's SARS outbreak, Fish tested synthetic interferons on a small pool of patients and found that their lungs healed significantly faster than those of control patients, allowing them to get off supplemental oxygen sooner. Like Lingappa, Fish has huge ambitions for these synthetics. If one of them succeeds, it could become a single drug to fight not just one virus or a few, but nearly every virus.
The third and arguably the most radical approach to broad-spectrum antivirals was conceived in the shower, of all places. It was 12 years ago, and Todd Rider was struck with a blinding insight about viruses—specifically, an idea for how to stop any virus in the world. By the time the shower was over, he knew exactly what to do.
Rider is a biological engineer. At MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in the late 1990s, he built a technology called Canary, a sensor for dangerous airborne pathogens like anthrax and smallpox. This ingenious box houses white blood cells, each of which is engineered to detect a particular kind of bacteria or virus. Canary is now installed in several government buildings in the Washington, DC, area. But for all the success of his invention, the experience left him profoundly dissatisfied. "I realized that if we detected bacteria, it was fine," Rider says. Doctors could prescribe antibiotics, after all. "But if we detected viruses, there really wasn't anything out there." Rider had read everything he could about traditional antivirals, and he had sensed an opportunity to create something quite different. "I wanted a treatment that was broad spectrum, that was effective against a wide range of viruses, and that would be difficult for viruses to evolve resistance to," he says.
That something—the thing Rider conceived of in the shower that day—was an artificial protein. To make it, he would need to marry parts of two natural proteins. One string would detect double-stranded RNA, the telltale sign of most invading viruses. The other would lead the infected cell to kill itself. Rider wanted to make a poison pill for cells: a protein that, when it grabbed onto the double-stranded RNA of a virus, would trigger instant cellular suicide. That may sound like a dangerous kind of therapy, but our bodies already rely on it to naturally fight both infections and cancer.
Rider dubbed his theoretical molecule Draco, for Double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer. On paper, at least, it looked great. Viruses that quickly evolve resistance to targeted antivirals would have no way of evading this weapon: Doing so "would need a whole new set of genes," Rider says.
The idea had come in a flash, but testing it proceeded slowly. Rider started in 2000, when manufacturing microbiological materials was still a struggle. (Today you can custom-order genes online and get them a few days later in a FedEx envelope.) Rider also had to stretch a lean budget, cobbled together from grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. In online databases, he found sequences for two genes that performed the functions he wanted to combine—detect double-stranded RNA and trigger apoptosis, or cell death—and then he joined the two into a single sequence. He gave his new protein an increasingly challenging series of tests. In one early experiment, he found that the protein could get inside cells and stay there for as long as 11 days. Next he injected rhinoviruses (which cause the common cold) into both ordinary human lung cells and lung cells carrying Draco. In the unprotected batches of cells, the rhinovirus multiplied, spreading from cell to cell and wiping out the entire population. When Rider added the virus to the Draco-protected cells, the infected cells promptly destroyed themselves, right on cue; the rest of the cells were left unharmed. Rider also found that he could stop the spread of the virus even if he injected Draco as long as three days after infection.
To see how Draco would fare in a living body, he began to study it in mice. To deliver the drug to the right place in the mice's bodies, Rider added a kind of molecular "address label" to the Draco protein such that the cells in a particular organ would be targeted. The mice seemed unharmed by the initial introduction. So Rider exposed the mice to flu viruses. Without Draco, four out of five mice died. But if he spritzed Draco into their nostrils just before or after the infection, they all lived.
Having published the results in the journal PLoS One last July, Rider is now preparing to test Draco against hemorrhagic fever and other viruses in mice and hopes to license the technology to a company that can take it to human trials. Rider sees his potential drug as a true broad-spectrum antiviral, but the "address label" can tailor it to go directly to particular organs. So if you have the flu, you would get lung-directed Draco; if you have a brain infection, it would go to your head.
Many virologists remain doubtful that any of these approaches will succeed in creating a wonder drug. Just consider the arduous path still faced by the rabies drug that Prosetta researchers have invented. They're now collaborating with the rabies division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate it further. To do so, they'll have to start running experiments on neurons, the cells that rabies actually infects. They'll have to work out the proper dosage of the drug. They'll have to start testing it in animals. Potential failure lurks at every step. Sometimes the immune system will attack antiviral drugs as if they were an invader. Drugs that work in mice are sometimes useless in humans.
Even success might bring unanticipated problems. That's certainly the lesson from the story of broad-spectrum antibiotics. If you swallow a Cipro pill for a salmonella infection, it will wipe out not just the salmonella but many other beneficial bacteria in your gut. Once the salmonella is gone, it may take weeks, months, or even years for the microbial ecosystem to return to something resembling its former state. This disruption can, ironically, allow other pathogens to sneak in and establish themselves. We also depend on bacteria in our bodies to guide our immune systems on the proper path of development. A number of studies suggest that children who get a lot of antibiotics are more at risk of developing immune disorders such as allergies and asthma. (See "Your Own Personal Ecosystem," an atlas of the human microbiome, in issue 19.10.)
Our bodies are rife not just with bacteria but with viruses too. Even when we're perfectly healthy, we have trillions of viruses inside of us. Scientists are only beginning to survey this viral ecology, but some suspect that it may actually be essential to our health. Many animals depend on viruses. Aphids, for example, need a virus that makes a toxin that prevents wasps from laying eggs inside their bodies. Scientists have found that infecting mice with lymphotrophic viruses protects them from developing diabetes. Other viruses attack cancer cells.
We may have such beneficial viruses inside our own bodies as well, waiting to be discovered. These viruses may not even infect our own cells but could instead be inside the bacteria that colonize us. Some species might keep the populations of their microbial hosts in check, like predators thinning a herd. Some viruses merge with bacteria rather than killing them, providing their hosts with useful genes for feeding or fighting off competitors. All of these microbe-infecting viruses may ultimately help us stay healthy.
It's conceivable that a broad-spectrum antiviral could devastate this complex, poorly understood biological jungle. As beneficial viruses disappeared, we might pay the price, developing diseases that the viruses used to keep at bay. Even Lingappa concedes that virus-killing could potentially go too far. "I don't think we want to kill all viruses," he says. "You only know about a virus when it does something bad. We've evolved with them. There's probably some virus out there doing something good."
There's a book floating around the desks at Prosetta these days: The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat. It's about the discovery of penicillin, but the book's author, Eric Lax, has dredged up parts of the story that are often forgotten. In particular, few people realize that Fleming abandoned research on penicillin not long after he discovered it. For more than a decade, while Fleming worked on vaccines and other projects, the potential of the drug went untapped. Untold lives were lost to bacterial infections during that time. Fleming's work was all but forgotten until 1938, when the Oxford pathologist Howard Florey stumbled across his papers and decided to take up where Fleming had left off.
No one wanted to fund Florey's work at first, so he had to scrape by until he was finally ready to treat his first patient in 1941. The patient, who had been pricked by a rose thorn and developed an infection, died anyway. It took another two years for Florey to build a case powerful enough to persuade the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to start making penicillin on an industrial scale. Florey, along with his collaborator Ernst Chain, shared the Nobel Prize with Fleming. But history tends to forget the 15 years of inaction and struggle that separated the iconic discovery of penicillin from its mass production.
Lingappa wants everyone at Prosetta to read this book. He considers it a necessary education for anyone who would dare to make the penicillin of viruses. "Everyone remembers Fleming," he says. "Fleming tried and failed, and it took Florey to come a decade later and ask, whatever happened to that stuff Fleming was working on?"
If the true history of penicillin can be any guide for scientists working on antivirals, it teaches them to hunker down and get ready to work for years—to prepare for disappointment, setbacks, and obscurity on the way to finding a drug that works not just in a dish of cells or a mouse but in a human being. The scientists who are working on antivirals today may not be the ones who find that drug. But if they do, future generations may someday tell the story of Vishwanath Lingappa's rabies or of Todd Rider's fateful shower.
Carl Zimmer (email@example.com) is the author, most recently, of A Planet of Viruses and Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.


text:
#RSL Tweets of the Day (@RealSaltLake)
Excited & sad for this game. Excited for the guys playing at the Riot 4 all our fans sad cause I'm not playing in... http://fb.me/1M6piWoHI
Winner goes on, ENUFF SAID!
#RSL vs Seattle 8pm MT #MLSonNBC #MLSCupPlayoffs
Yea it's here game day, playoff time lets get to the riot early and show Seattle who the best fans in the league are
Make sure
#RioTintoStadium is full tonight! Arrive early, wear red, be loud! ... Kick v SEA at 8p MT #MLSpla http://instagr.am/p/RxgRQbsFVn/
This family is ready for the
#RIOT tonight. Believes been blasting #RSL #MLSPlayoffs #WinTheWholeEffingThing #RSLvSEApic.twitter.com/cWNG6osh
RSL Team Store
#gameday!! #MLSCupPlayoffs are upon us so cheer on #RSL and check out the team store for deals before the crowds at the game tonight :)
(AUDIO) ESPN700: RSL GM Garth Lagerwey on "The Bill and Hans Show"
(VIDEO) RealSaltLake.com: RSL Insider, Presented by AT&T: RSL vs. Seattle Preview
(VIDEO) MLSsoccer.com: Highlights: LA 3-SJ 1 – LA advances
(VIDEO) MLSsoccer.com: Highlights: SKC 1-HOU 0 – Houston advances
Real Salt Lake News & Notes
RealSaltLake.com: Playoff Preview: RSL-Seattle Sounders FC
RealSaltLake.com: Scouting Seattle: Johnson good to go, Rosales a question mark
Salt Lake Tribune: It's win or go home for Real Salt Lake, Seattle
Deseret News: Real Salt Lake taking nothing for granted at home against Seattle
MLSsoccer.com: Preview: RSL stand in way of Seattle's first playoff series win
MLSsoccer.com: RSL's Lagerwey: Tough choices can wait for offseason
Prost Amerika: Watson-Siriboe: My mind's in the right place thanks to two coaches
Prost Amerika: Kreis: We've watched Gspurning penalty shootout video
Prost Amerika: Q+A with Garth Lagerwey
For the Fans, By the Fans
RSL Soapbox: Despite goal paucity, Kreis not panicking
RSL Soapbox: Espindola, Olave set for game-time decisions against Seattle
Keepin' it Real: Rimando's nose for the ball familiar to Sigi
RSL Soccer Talk: The Road to the Cup: Western Conference Semifinals Leg 2 – RSL vs. Seattle Sounders
MLS + Other News and Notes
MLSsoccer.com: Recap: Keane, Galaxy top Quakes 3-1, head to West Final
MLSsoccer.com: Recap: SKC win battle, but Dynamo advance 2-1 on aggregate
MLSsoccer.com: Kinnear full of praise for "disciplined" Dynamo defense
MLSsoccer.com: "Complete game" from SKC, but same old story in attack
MLSsoccer.com: Three thoughts on #SKCvHOU: Houston find a way
MLSsoccer.com: Gonzalez on win over SJ: "We finally put this team down"
MLSsoccer.com: Wondo on three missed chances: "I let the team down"
MLSsoccer.com: Three thoughts on #SJvLA: Donovan has us all fooled
MLSsoccer.com: NY-DC postponed due to blizzard at Red Bull Arena | Rescheduled for Thursday, 7:30 p.m.
Soccer By Ives: MLS official gives detailed explanation for RBNY-DC postponement
NBC Sports: Schedule set for U.S. final round World Cup qualifying
Scouting Report: Seattle Sounders FC
MLSsoccer.com: Rosales' status TBD, but Seattle's Schmid feels "good vibe"
Seattle Times: Sounders' season comes down to win or else at Real Salt Lake
Seattle Times: Sigi Schmid tried to trade for Kyle Beckerman back in 2007 with Columbus


text:
What's New
Bad Dog Font by Fonthead Design
About: Bad Dog is haphazard yet charming. Bad Dog is both whimsical and clumsy, like sign for kids lemonade stand. Bad Dog is messy and fun. Bad Dog is like handwriting of Lil' Rascals. Bad Dog is irresistible, like happy, sloppy bulldog. When Bad Dog was puppy, it chewed off its serifs.
Tags: Font, Fun, Handwritten, Wacky


text:
James Carroll has won admiration and gratitude from many for Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, his landmark work examining the historic role of the Catholic church in fostering anti-Semitism. In it, he argues unsparingly that the ground for the Holocaust was richly seeded by centuries of church indoctrination that demonized Jews as being collectively guilty for killing Christ.
Carroll has also written sympathetically of the importance of Israel as a Jewish homeland and refuge. All the more perplexing, then, that in numerous opinion pieces in the Boston Globe, this thoughtful writer has missed or distorted vital information about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Perhaps most inexplicable, given the writer's awareness of the lethal impact of the inculcation of hatred against Jews in Europe, is his apparent refusal to credit Palestinian hate-indoctrination as the underlying cause of the savage attacks against Jews in Israel. Instead, readers are offered platitudes such as his claim that "Palestinian terrorism is rooted, above all, in the economic hopelessness of millions of impoverished and dispossessed Palestinians..." (September 2001) Carroll is evidently unwilling to hold accountable the Palestinian Authority, which from its inception has stoked anti-Jewish hatred through schools, media, mosques, summer camps and political rallies that have painted Jews as alien, thieving conquerors, to be driven out or destroyed.
The calamitous outcome is a population energized to kill a dehumanized foe.
Carroll minimizes Palestinian enthusiasm for terrorism.
In the same vein, Carroll minimizes Palestinian enthusiasm for terrorism. In a June 2003 column devoted almost entirely to Palestinian grievances -- including his observation that "destruction of trees can be almost as shocking as assaults on human life" -- he asserted that "a mere fraction of the Palestinian population" supports terrorism. Yet a respected Palestinian polling agency, the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, just weeks earlier had found a substantial majority of 59.9% of Palestinians supported suicide bombings "against Israeli civilians." How, one wonders, is it possible for Mr. Carroll to confront the Catholic church for its action but to deny virulent hate-mongering by the PA?
In other instances, Carroll's opinion pieces are marred by surprising misinformation that tilts against Israel. For instance, on February 17, 2004 in a column datelined "Jerusalem," he described Israel's security fence as "a high cement barrier that will run hundreds of miles..." and that "veers far from the original 1967 border in numerous places... a repudiation of the hope for a negotiated resolution to the conflict over territory."
Wrong on multiple counts, he included a correction of the first statement in his next column. It read: "In my column on Feb. 17, I referred to the barrier between Israel and the West Bank as a 'high cement barrier that will run hundreds of miles...' As readers pointed out to me, the cement portion of the wall/fence will not run the whole distance. Barbed wire will also be used." This unworthy "correction" does not, of course, make clear that Israel's barrier includes only a few miles of concrete wall -- less than 3% of the total when completed -- and that concrete is being used only at those points close to Palestinian towns where gunmen have shot at civilians driving in Israel on Israeli roads.
Mr. Carroll did not correct the other error at all -- a serious one he has made repeatedly, regarding what he terms the "original 1967 border." (A May 2002 column devoted to assailing Israel for allegedly "dissolving" its eastern "border" also referred to the "vestigial 'green line,' the borders of 1967.") But the 1967 lines are not a border. After the 1947-48 war, the Arabs refused to recognize Israel, and insisted the boundaries were only ceasefire lines, and this remained their legal status. The eastern borders of Israel are yet to be decided. Moreover, UN Resolution 242, the foundation stone of Arab-Israeli negotiations, explicitly avoided requiring an Israeli retreat to the 1967 lines, its drafters believing those were indefensible.
In addition, Israel's fence can, of course, be moved, and its construction hardly constitutes a repudiation of a negotiated settlement, as Carroll claims.
In numerous other assertions about Israel, the writer falls prey to rote accusation -- that Ariel Sharon and settlements are the problem, and that Israel has used "overwhelming force," "collective punishment" and "extrajudicial assassination." In a characteristic statement just weeks after the 2002 massacre of innocents on Pesach and the launch of Operation Defensive Shield, Carroll declared that "Israeli incursions into the West Bank have been irrational and counterproductive..."
Undoubtedly, James Carroll favors the defense of Jewish life by the sovereign state of Israel just as he eloquently lamented its vast loss during the millennia of Jewish statelessness. At the same time, however, he attacks Israel for whatever means it uses to defend its people in the current terror war.
Carroll would prefer, no doubt, that a solution come about by Israel again offering Camp David-style concessions and the Palestinians this time reciprocating with genuine peace. But the Palestinians, under the Palestinian Authority, have overwhelmingly and brutally rejected that course.
In placing the onus on Israel for the ongoing violence and characterizing as illegitimate its efforts at defense, the writer does a disservice to Israel no less unfair than the anti-Jewish campaigns of the past he commendably criticizes.
Courtesy of www.camera.org


text:
On the day of the Cleveland Elementary School shootings, Principal Pat Busher felt nothing but rage toward Patrick Purdy.
On the day of the Cleveland Elementary School shootings, Principal Pat Busher felt nothing but rage toward Patrick Purdy.
Purdy was 24 when he killed five Stockton schoolchildren and wounded 31 others. When he was done, Purdy killed himself.
"I remember seeing Patrick Purdy's dead body, and I remember hating that man," Busher said recently. "The fact that this young man was dead and part of his head was blown off didn't bother me at all, because I hated him for having killed our children."
Her viewpoint became less visceral and gained nuance when she later learned about Purdy's troubled childhood.
One person who remembers Purdy as a child is Joan Cappalla, a longtime Record employee. She recalls him as a neighborhood kid who once chased her sons carrying a wooden-handled butcher knife. He was less than 9 years old.
"You could see it back then," Cappalla said. "It could be winter. (The Purdy children) wouldn't have jackets on. It would be cold. They were locked out of the house. No kind of supervision, no guidance; obviously, there was a lot of rage."
The most detailed account of Purdy's life is found in the October 1989 report on the Cleveland shooting by then-California Attorney General John Van de Kamp.
Patrick Edward Purdy was born Nov. 10, 1964, in Fort Lewis, Wash., to parents who would divorce three years later, setting the stage for a lifetime of instability.
In September 1969, living in Stockton with his mother, Kathleen, who had remarried, Purdy began kindergarten at Cleveland. He would attend there through third grade.
By fall 1973, Purdy's mother had divorced his stepfather, and the family was living in Sacramento. Twice that December, Purdy and two siblings would be taken into protective custody after a neighbor's report of child neglect.
Purdy had his first scrape with the law at age 12 when he was a suspect in an assault in Lodi, a case with an unknown disposition.
From there, trouble was unceasing. When he was 13, El Dorado County sheriff's deputies confiscated his pellet gun. At 14, he was reported "for informational purposes only" to be beyond parental control by the South Lake Tahoe police.
A few months later, Purdy was living with a foster parent who told officers she feared him because he had knives and a BB gun. That same year, he was treated for alcoholism at a clinic in Stockton.
For much of the last 10 years of his life, Purdy was on his own. Sniffing glue. Public drunkenness. An arrest at age 15 for working as a prostitute in West Hollywood. Various odd jobs. Purchasing weapons.
And, through it all, Purdy never received sustained mental health intervention, even when he was nearly 22 and deemed to have an antisocial personality. He told one mental health professional he was "struggling to resist actions on thoughts which are destructive in nature."
A little more than two years later, Purdy would line up 100 green plastic soldiers in his motel room near Highway 99, drive to Cleveland and perform his tragic final act.
Later that day, 6-year-old Rob Young - with a bullet hole in his foot - would tell his mother as he lay in a hospital bed, "He was a sick, sick man. He didn't know any better." At 26, Young still feels the same way. "I'm a devout Christian," Young said. "It's hard for me to hate, really, anybody."
Others have said they were relieved Purdy killed himself, sparing families and survivors from a protracted court process.
Then-paramedic Gary Gillis is an exception. He wishes Purdy had lived "so we could have studied him and found out what his motivations were."
Some remain angry, because they believe his crime was motivated by ethnic hatred.
According to the attorney general, Purdy "blamed all minorities for his failings and selected Southeast Asians because they were the minority with whom he was most in contact."
"My daughter was very young and innocent," said Lim Touch, whose 8-year-old daughter, Oeun Lim, died in the shootings. "Why did that person come and kill all the innocent kids? ... I'm really curious about why Purdy just killed only kids that had black hair, because Asians have black hair."
Others' long-held feelings are at a gut level. "Patrick Purdy should burn in hell, period," retired Stockton Deputy Police Chief Lucian Neely said. "I can't help it. That's just how I feel. He may have been a troubled little 5-year-old that nobody had the chance to intervene or help. But the result of that is just more than I can deal with."
As for Busher, her feelings shifted months after the shootings when one of her teachers privately told her she'd had him in a class years earlier. Signs of trouble were evident even then in the eyes of the young loner who would stare "with just kind of hollow eyes."
"It was only at that time that I all of a sudden had a wake-up call and remembered that Patrick Purdy was once a little boy," Busher said. "We failed him."


text:
Holiday Open House
and here it is with the stockings I made for the family. You can read more about them (and see them better)here.
and I also have some on this little tree.
And I LOVE filling apothecary jars! Oh yes I do!
If you want some easy-to-make decorations...try making some of these cute Christmas Topiary Trees. I show you how here.
Nothing like a festive birdcage...just loaded it with my favorite toile ornaments and some glass balls, and voila!
And, of course, the tree. (the kiddos did a great job decorating it!) You can see some fun closeups of the ornaments here.
Oh, and since we don't have a chimney, Santa has to use a magic key to get in our house. I had the key, but I borrowed an idea from Kari & Kijsa, and put it in this jar with a little faux snow. (Love that rhyme!)
This little bunny (also a gift from my M-I-L) keeps watch for iceskating opportunities in the library.


text:
Emerging Wallabies lock Izack Rodda has committed to Australia beyond next year's World Cup and opted to stay with the Queensland Reds.
The 22-year-old second rower has re-signed with Rugby Australia and the Reds for two more seasons, tying him until the end of 2020.
He is clearly one of the young players national coach Michael Cheika is investing in looking ahead to the 2019 World Cup in Japan.
Rodda, who broke into the Wallabies side just over a year ago, has won 10 caps.
He has started in the last eight Tests, including all six this year, and appears to be part of Cheika's favoured second row combination along with Adam Coleman.
"Honestly, if you had asked me three years ago where I would be, I wouldn't have said here with the Wallabies," Rodda said.
"It's come very fast but I have loved every moment of it.
"In saying that, I still need to work very hard to keep my spot.
All Blacks blow up over quarantine
Qantas ends Wallabies sponsorship
NZ Rugby needs us as much as we need them: 5 Mins with Fitzy
"There's a lot of competition in my position coming through both the Reds and the Wallabies so it's going to keep me on my toes.
"I want to try get in the World Cup squad then cement a spot in the 23, and hopefully win a World Cup."
The NSW Waratahs were reportedly interested in Rodda, who was born and raised on the NSW north coast.
But Rodda has flourished as part of the powerful young Reds pack developed by coach Brad Thorn.
"The Reds gave me my first crack and my first contract," Rodda said.
"I was one year out of school and I haven't really looked back since.
"It's an unreal program that's been growing each year and now that Thorny is the boss, it's just going in the right direction as a club and all the players want to be there to keep growing that great vibe."


text:
Welcome to KCHF TV
In January 1984, as part of his new Son Broadcasting Network, Belarmino "Blackie" Gonzalez launched KCHF TV-11 out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the first full-powered VHF Christian television station in the United States and the first Christian station in New Mexico.
The station has continued to air Christian programming locally and internationally with a reputation for excellence that garnered it the Station of the Year Award in both 2008 and 2000 by the National Religious Broadcasters and William Ward Ayer Distinguished Service Award in 2010.
A ministry of excellence in Christian television for almost 30 years, KCHF TV has expanded to cover more than 97% of New Mexico. Programming includes local, national, and international Christian ministries, as well as originally produced programs. KCHF is available OTA (Over the Air), via satellite (Direct/Dish) and can be seen on over 17 cable systems across New Mexico. Additionally, it can be accessed online as well. Read More
Our Mission
The mission of KCHF TV-11 is to provide excellence in Christian television that brings the life-changing love of God to viewers throughout New Mexico.


text:
Pos Indonesia asks us to inform the designated operators of UPU member countries that a 7.4-magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit the country on Friday, 28 September 2018 at about 17.00 local time, devastating Palu, Donggala and Mamuju in the Central Sulawesi province. Most of the buildings and roads in the affected areas suffered major damage, and electricity, communication and fuel were cut off.
Pos Indonesia has had to temporarily suspend (from 29 September 2018) processing and delivery of letter mail, parcels and EMS to the affected districts with the following postcodes:
– Palu: 941xx to 942xx
– Donggala, Parigi and Moutong: 943xx
– Mamuju Utara: 915xx
Pos Indonesia thanks designated operators for their understanding and will provide an update via EmIS once the situation has returned to normal.


text:
A few years ago, I did some publishing consulting work for Elliot Weissbluth, the CEO of HighTower Advisors in Chicago. After learning about his firm, as I subsequently wrote in these pages, I came to believe that HighTower's "hybrid" merger of independent client-centered advice with sophisticated financial solutions and products—traditionally found in brokerage firms and private banks—represents the future of financial advice. Recently, I realized that while I had learned a lot about HighTower's products and services, I didn't know much about how the firm structures the relationships with its affiliated advisors. To fill this gap, I caught up with Weissbluth recently, and he was more than happy to further my education. What I learned is that HighTower is as innovative with its advisory firms as it is with its product line, and I was even more impressed with the power of HighTower's business model to provide competitive advantages for its advisors.
I've been fascinated with firm valuations since I stumbled across fledgling FP Transitions (now Business Transitions) more than a decade ago. FP Transitions was a pioneer in providing listings that matched firms for sale with potential buyers, as well as sophisticated valuation services based on the going market prices for similar firms.
Initially, that is to say 10 years ago, FP Transitions found that most firm transactions were valued at around two times gross revenues. In those early days, the idea of selling an advisory firm was a novelty: Independent advisors had only been managing client assets for a fee for little more than a decade. Consequently, there was considerable debate over what the value of those assets might be, if any. I remember many conversations with Mark Tibergien, then head of consultant Moss Adams Advisory Services (now CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions), in which he fervently maintained that the market overvalued advisory practices and that most firms, when valued on profitability, were barely worth the equivalent of 1.5 times revenues, depending on their overhead.
However, David Grau at FP Transitions was steadfastly reporting that advisors were buying firms for multiples of two times revenues or higher. And, of course, we all heard rumors of institutions such as banks paying far higher multiples for larger firms, but those numbers were hard to verify. Grau realized that the key issue in acquisition was the retention of the clients, and his firm created a program to facilitate the transition of clients from the old advisor to a new one with astonishingly high success rates (over 90%).
FP Transitions' revenue-based valuation model always made sense to me and still does for acquisitions by other advisors. If one advisory firm is simply buying the clients of another firm to be absorbed into their business model, then the efficiency or inefficiency of the operations of the seller are irrelevant: The buyer knows what its margins are and structures its valuation accordingly. Aside from particularly high-maintenance clients, the only issue is successfully transferring the clients to the buyer.
Over the years, Mark Hurley, CEO of Fiduciary Network, a Dallas-based financier of succession-oriented advisory firm buyouts, has consistently maintained that the market has woefully undervalued the AUM at independent firms when the growth of those revenue streams over the next 10 or 20 years are considered. The market for advisory firms seems to have borne out both Grau and Hurley: Grau recently told me that independent firm acquisition prices have pushed well past three times revenues.
While the structure of Fiduciary Network's deals are confidential, FP Transitions' acquisition structures have always been an open book. Typically, the acquiring firms pay one-third of the value of the selling firm in cash up front; one-third in a promissory note; and one-third is contingent on successfully transferring the clients to the new owner. Grau has found that the shared risk of the client transfer by the seller creates significant motivation to actively participate in a smooth transition.
In contrast with advisor-to-advisor transitions, HighTower has a stake in the profitability of the firms it acquires. While the HighTower model can be used for the succession from one generation of advisors to the next, that transition is facilitated over nearly a decade. The model is based on using HighTower's considerable collective negotiating and buying power to reduce the overhead costs of the firms it acquires and split the remaining net revenues evenly between the firms' principal advisors and parent company. HighTower increases these economies of scale by working with multiple product, services, technology and custody providers (for instance, it has relationships with all four major custodians: Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade and Pershing), and soliciting competitive bids for best pricing. This structure creates incentives for principal advisors to maximize revenues and minimize costs, while motivating the HighTower home office to reduce the collective costs and to help its advisors grow their firms.
Due to its sensitivity to the cost structures of its advisory firms, HighTower bases its firm valuations on net rather than gross revenues. According to Weissbluth, HighTower values the firms it acquires at five times the revenues it is buying (or about 3.5 times gross revenues), net of overhead projected to include the HighTower savings. "We see many firms with 40% to 50% expense ratios," he said. "With our buying leverage, our goal is to get that overhead down to 30%. We're almost always successful." As mentioned above, the 70% net revenues then are split between the firm principles and HighTower. It should be noted that those expenses do not include principle compensation or the compensation of support advisors. "If firm principals want to leverage themselves to increase revenues with support advisors," said Weissbluth, "that's fine; but the increased cost comes out of their portion of the net revenues."
The structure of these buyouts is half the cash up front with the other half vesting over nine years. The selling advisors also sign a nine-year note to pay back the cash should they leave the firm, which is proportionately forgiven for each year they vest. What's more, the selling advisors also get an ownership stake in HighTower, which entitles all the advisors collectively to 25% of the firm's annual profits and equity.
Notice that nowhere in these calculations do advisory assets under management factor into the equation. "Assets can be misleading," said Weissbluth. "What was the firm's overhead? And more importantly, what is the quality of those assets? If you see a firm with $200 million in AUM and $2 million in revenues, those aren't very high-quality assets. We like to see clients paying between 50 and 60 basis points: Then we know they are high-net-worth investors or institutions."
To date, HighTower has used this formula (exactly this formula: "We don't want any of our advisors to feel someone else got a better deal," said Weissbluth) to acquire 38 firms, which include more than 80 advisors, that are now organized into 25 offices around the country. While the firm doesn't disclose its total AUM, a reasonable estimate would put that figure in the $204 billion to $255 billion range. "We are the only independent firm to have more than $1 billion with each of the four major RIA custodians. That means they listen to us," Weissbluth said. "And one thing we've worked with each of them on is increasing the sophistication of their products and their technology. Today, the independent platforms are vastly superior to their Wall Street counterparts with technology and with more products at a better price. We're very proud of that."
From a valuation perspective, HighTower confirms FP Transitions' (and others') figures of around 3.5 times revenues for high-quality, transferable assets. Its deal structure creates incentives for firm principles to both grow their businesses and manage their costs. It's motivated HighTower to help move the independent world into at least parity with the large brokerage firms. At the risk of repeating myself, these are just a couple of reasons why HighTower and its business model are likely to be the future of independent advice.


text: Development & Education Denver group turns abandoned barn into collaboration space for fighting global poverty The World December 05, 2012 In the fight against global poverty, little is easy. A Denver group is recognizing that and trying to bring groups in that field together to leverage each other's strengths and make it easier for them to work together. They're turning to an abandoned horse barn to do so.


text:
The Biggest Mistake Most of Us Make
on the Spiritual Path
By Craig Hamilton
Many of us today are engaging in a tremendous amount of spiritual work on ourselves. We're meditating, praying, and attending workshops, seminars, and retreats. And yet the vast majority of us are making the same mistake. We tend to put far too much significance on the need to work out our personal psychological issues as part of our spiritual path.
It's important to recognize that this isn't our fault. This tendency grew out of our psychotherapeutic culture, which basically told us that we were all messed up by our childhood and that we have "inner wounds" that need to be healed in order to become happy and fulfilled as adults. And, as the great enlightenment teachings have been imported to the West, this psychotherapeutic worldview has gradually become superimposed onto the spiritual path.
The way this plays out practically is as follows: Let's say that I take up a spiritual practice in earnest, and I notice in the course of that practice that I'm deeply defended against life and intimacy. I won't let other people see me. I always wear a social mask that actually hides a lot of insecurity. Well, upon discovering this, as a psychologically informed modern person, my tendency is going to be to withdraw inward, to go back to my past, to start plumbing the depths of my psyche to try to find and uproot the personal causes of this fear and insecurity and tendency to hide myself from life.
But in an authentic spiritual context, we would point out that this "personal problem" you've discovered is in fact simply one of the basic, ordinary manifestations of ego. And, rather than sending you on an endless and pointless archaeological dig into your psyche, we'd simply encourage you to face directly into the Truth of what you were seeing, to see the psychological tendency clearly, and the motivations that are driving it in the present. Most importantly, we'd encourage you to make direct effort in the opposite direction of your habitual response. So, in this example, when you see yourself preparing to put on a good face, we would encourage you to instead take the frightening leap to be transparent and vulnerable.
Upon reading this, many psychologically informed experts will protest, asserting that, if it were that easy to change, everyone would have already changed and there would be no need for . . . well, no need for psychotherapy . . . And this is a perfectly reasonable response from someone who has had no experience engaging in the kind of spiritual practice I'm describing.
But what happens when we let go of this compulsion to work out our problems, and instead begin to directly engage in a path of active transformation like the one I encourage, is that we find suddenly that we have access to a part of our self that is already free from our ego's limitations and issues. It's a part of our self that was never wounded or traumatized, that doesn't need to be healed, that is already whole and complete, and has access to boundless energy, creativity, and positivity, and is completely ready to participate in life fully, boldly, passionately, holding nothing back. And, in this, we feel instantly connected to the heart of the spiritual thrust behind the cosmos.
Miraculously, what we find in doing this work is that when people awaken to and begin to act from this deeper, truer part of the self, then all of the psychological issues, blocks, wounds, complexes, and neuroses that would have taken years to work through suddenly seem to dissolve. Now, the truth is that they haven't dissolved. They can still be reactivated if we step back into the perspective of the ego. But in light of this newfound, higher potential, and the profound sense of purpose and meaning that comes with it, we discover a powerful reason to no longer fall prey to our "issues." Simply put, they are no longer interesting to us, and in that, they lose their power over our psyche. And that seems to make all the difference in the world. In this, we begin to discover the real meaning of freedom from the ego. And we learn that this freedom is not something we have to wait for. It can happen now if we're willing to give our heart and soul to it.
Reprinted by Permission from IntegralEnlightenment.com.
Craig Hamilton is the founder of Integral Enlightenment and a member of Deepak Chopra's Evolutionary Leaders Forum, is a pioneer in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. He integrates decades of intensive spiritual practice with insights gleaned during his eight years as senior editor of What Is Enlightenment? magazine and 13 years with the EnlightenNext spiritual community. In his current work, he is helping to articulate an authentic evolutionary spirituality—an "integral enlightenment" which illuminates the vital relationship between individual transformation and collective evolution.


text:
Calendar | Community
| Family & Friends in the Armed Forces
| Good Neighbors
| Milestones
Community Action |
Humane Society | YMCA |
Diaspora | Reunions
Lincoln Park District
Lincoln Park District on the Web
Park district notes
From Roy
Logan, program coordinator
Send a link to a friend
03, 2013]
Sign up your team for men's basketball. League
play will be on Sunday afternoons. Fees will include 10
regular-season games and a double-elimination tournament. Also two
officials and a scorekeeper will be provided for each game. Daily
admittance fee will be applied to nonmembers. The Lincoln Park
District is offering a special $30 track and court membership for
league participants that will cover the daily admittance fees for
the entire spring league schedule, game and non-game days.
Registration packets are available at the back desk in the Sports
Center. If you want to participate as a "free agent," registration
information is available at the same location. For further
information, call the park district at 732-8770, email
firstname.lastname@example.com, or contact Robert Jackson at
217-314-1646 or
And for those of you
wanting more one-on-one instruction, the trainers at the Lincoln
Park District Fit Zone are experienced and qualified to assist
anyone at any fitness level reach their goals. They are friendly,
reliable and able to get you started on a fitness program just for
[Text from file received from Roy Logan,
Lincoln Park District]
Back to top
News |
Sports | Business |
Rural Review |
Teaching & Learning
Home and Family |
| Obituaries
Community |
Law & Courts |
Leisure Time
Spiritual Life |
Health & Fitness |
Teen Scene
Letters to the Editor


text:
Best Comfort Electric Bikes
Electric Bike Plus is your number one source for Comfort Electric Bikes. You'll find only the Best Comfort Electric Bikes on our website. With full customer support, including lifetime expert advice, and a guaranteed low price, you can feel confident buying your Comfort Electric Bikes from Electric Bike Plus.
Order your Comfort Electric Bikes today from Electric Bike Plus to get Free shipping on all of our Comfort Electric Bikes. Order today for your chance to win a special promotion + free gift! See product page for more details.
American Electric GenZe 350W Bluetooth Electric Bike E201
American Electric GenZe 350W Sport Silver Crossbar Electric Bike E101
American Electric GenZe 36V 9.6Ah Step-Thru Electric Bike E222
American Electric Veller 36V 10Ah Step Through Cruiser Electric Bicycle AEV-IVRY
Let customers speak for us
Love the bike! Serves my purpose of bike riding the neighborhood without getting exhausted. Got it quickly, and terrific communication with Electric Bike Plus.
The bike is great just as described. We received great customer service. The owner followed up with us on every step of the purchase, which was very helpful. Thank you!
We ordered an electric trike for my 78 year old father. He loves it. It delivered quickly. Calls with the Electric Bike Plus were helpful and without long wait times. Next time I'll by an e-bike it will be from EBP!
At first, I'm a bit hesitant to buy this bad boy as it is already way beyond my budget. But when I test ride from one of my friends who had one was immediately impressed by the torque power and speed was awesome.
Awesome bike comfortable, classic and so easy to ride. There were some minor issues but was able to fix it.
Bought this as a gift for my son and he absolutely loved it. Amazed by its features and super affordable price. Now my neighbor wants one too. thanks nakto!
Exceeds my expectations, the ride was fantastic. Everything was adjusted so perfectly....
This bicycle is a very good value since it can be used in either manual or electric mode. Both the handlebar and seat height and inclination are adjustable. After assembly and a little trial and error, I managed to figure out the functions and use of all the controls. In the manual mode the bike acts like any other six-speed, there is a little red button that switches between manual and electric with each push. The electric mode is used either with the handlebar twist throttle or by peddling which activates it. The pedal brings the bike up to full speed while peddling slightly and with the throttle the speed is adjustable. I am very happy with my purchase.
So far the most affordable bike and love the comfort. Recommend
Bought this ebike for my wifey and she likes it. I'm a lifelong cyclist and wanted a bike that would be easier for my wife to use so that we can ride together. This one is perfect. It arrived 90 percent assembled and it was very easy to complete the task - no need to take it to a local bike shop. The bike is fast and quiet. The build quality is excellent.
Nice scooter. Easy to put together and the battery was fully charged. I was able to use it within 30 minutes! It is very quiet and easy to maneuver. Love it!
I like it for the most part. A little bigger than I thought it would be. I'm not really used to it yet. It has power but the wheels are too slick and it skids on wet grass or dirt. Wish it had more of a mud tire on the front. Runs good and battery last a long time.
We bought the EW 18 (blue) and it has been a simply amazing experience for my 8 year old grandaughter who has a congenital heart condition. It was super easy to unpack and start using. We plan on a family biking trip to a state park soon, and she's so excited to use her scooter. The look on her face is worth the cost, and the confidence it's meant to her is priceless. Thanks for such a nice experience.
Definitely like all of it except the only thing I wish it had a cover, we live in a rural area with dusty surroundings.
It's like a mini scooter van, it has big compartments, the ride is comfy and my grandkids want to ride with me on weekends.
This is my 3rd ebike and so far enjoyed riding it compared to my previous - the ride & quality is great.
Love the portability & functionality. High 5!
Had a fantastic ride with this bike, assist is smooth, strong and the speed is unbelievable. Makes bike riding so enjoyable :)
Had a great time riding the bike in the city for my daily commute to work and it's absolutely fantastic. Only comment back rack is a bit small for my stuff.
We stay outdoors most of the time & good to have this solar charger along with you for extra juice. Must have for outdoor geeks!
This beast elevated my hunting experience, it really climbs like a MULE!!!
I was totally impressed on how it delivers & performs more than I expected. There were some minor issues but overall it's a great hunting bike. They have excellent customer service as well, great job Bakcou!!!
No problem getting on & off very easy to use. Just need to get used to the power it has and get used to turning. It's a little different than a regular bike, it's a 3-wheeled trike. I wish it had turn signals, in addition to its lights & horn.
Absolutely funtastic ebike & glad I bought it after so many searching online. This was the best value I could find.
Absolutely love this bike for cruising along the beachfront & around town. I am in my 70's and it gives me freedom to live the life I want with my new bike buddy.
The bike feels nicely made compared to larger fat tire ebikes but having the option to fold up is a big plus. It has 500W power rear hub motor and it delivers really good.
Surprisingly fast & nimble. Perfect for my long rides on back roads & cruising around town.
This seagull electric MTB is so much fun to ride. It brought me the thrill of riding back again and gave me the ability to ride, explore more interesting places.
I can't afford to buy an expensive bike so I searched around that's within my budget. Ecotric Vortex was the best value so far & free shipping. This is my first ebike and already loving it.
For the price it's good value and looks durable & fun to ride.
So far so good, bike arrived in good condition. Took it for a spin around the city, the ride was comfortable and amazingly fun to ride :)
Wowed by the sleek style, sporty color accent, smooth & very responsive suspension. Had a blast trekking the mountain with this bad boy, no regrets. Absolute fun!!!
After a lot of research to find an on & off-road ebike, I finally got what I wanted. I use my ebike storm to move around my farm and it took me minutes instead of grueling hours.
Love this electric hunting bike - quiet, strong & yet sturdy. It can carry almost all of my hunting accessories with ease and way faster to navigate rough terrain. It's my best hunting buddy...


text:
This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Rich McKenzie, 19, woke up on a beautiful morning in the vast desert wilderness near Utah's San Rafael Swell.
His brother and best friends were swimming shoulder deep in a river, near the bank where the group was camping. The teens were celebrating their recent high school graduation and the possibilities ahead.
Rich snapped their photo. Then he waded into the murky water and stretched his arms to the sky. His brother whispered to himself, "Rich, don't dive."
It was too late. He dove in, struck a sandbar hidden just 6 inches below the river's surface and his life changed.
Instead of making plans to finish college, become a dentist and start a family, he lay paralyzed in a hospital bed for months, learning to function with the few muscles he could move.
In his darkest hours he wondered: Could the future be as full as what he'd envisioned? What would it be like to watch from the sidelines as his friends achieved their goals?
Fourteen years after the 1998 dive, he no longer thinks about what might have been. He instead thinks about what he has friends that have become brothers, irrevocably bonded by one July day.
'It was terrifying' • A swimmer trained at Fremont High School, Rich dove fast and he dove hard. His arms hit first, dislocating his shoulders. Then his head hit, shattering a bone vertebrae high in his neck.
He was face down in the water. He remembers seeing his arms floating in front of him and trying to push up. But his limbs did not respond.
Within 30 seconds, his friends were there. And after that, Rich said, "They've been my hands ever since."
Rich's brother, Dave McKenzie, and his friends, Chris Hanson, Pete Norseth, Steve Kippen, carefully turned Rich over with a squeeze grip they'd learned in lifeguard training. Hanson held Rich's neck as the others carried him through the slippery water and rocks back to shore.
The four 18-year-olds knew a little about spinal cord injuries, and they could tell that Rich was in bad shape.
The five had hiked about eight miles into the wilderness the day before. There was no way that Rich was walking out. There was no way they were carrying him out.
Surprised to get a signal with the cellphone their parents had insisted they take, they called for help. A search-and-rescue team and a medical helicopter headed their way.
They waited.
For six hours, Rich lay under the tarp his friends used to shield him from the blistering hot sun. They gave him the little water they had and attempted to filter more. They tried to keep him cool.
Rich said he felt intense pain in his neck and shoulders, but when Hanson would squeeze his toes, he felt nothing. His friends were afraid that if he lost consciousness he wouldn't regain it, so his brother stayed by his side, asking constant questions.
Rich tried to play the game, too, telling his brother random stories that popped into his head.
"It's weird the things that go through your mind. Fairy tales, really?" he said.
He started to think he could die. But, he adds, "I knew that my friends were there. They weren't going to let it happen."
And he offered up a deal: "If I get out of here, no matter what shape I'm in, it's going to be OK, and I'll just make the best out of that life."
When a helicopter finally landed in the difficult terrain, rescuers could only take Rich forcing a "horrible separation moment for all of us," he said.
As Rich was flown to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City for emergency surgery to remove bone shards from his neck, his brother and friends hiked for hours back out of the canyon with little food and water.
They then had to endure the long drive back home, not knowing Rich's fate.
"It was terrifying. It was just life changing," Kippen said. "...That was the beginning of a new life for all of us."
'Dealing with what you're given' • The rescue, Rich said, was a "miracle. Total miracle ... I felt like there was a purpose that I made it out of there, [although I] wasn't really sure what that was."
Once it was clear that Rich would survive, his family and friends had to adjust to life with a new and different person.
Growing up, Rich and Dave McKenzie were always on the move they went rock climbing, swam and ran track. With his brother's paralysis, "I felt like I had lost a part of me," said Dave McKenzie.
Volleyball brought the five friends together when they were just 14. The group quietly wondered how they would all move ahead.
Rich had to learn how to feed himself. He had to learn how to get around in a wheelchair, how to drive again. He also had to find a new direction. Before the accident, he wanted to be a dentist.
There were days at a time that Rich was depressed, he said. Then he'd remember the bargaining he did while he waited for the helicopter.
"We just kind of made this pact with my dad and my mom, my friends and my brothers: I could have one down day a week. I didn't have to get out of bed if I didn't want to ... I could just sit there and be sad," Rich said. After that one day was up, it was back to work.
And work he did.
He earned a bachelor's degree in English, followed by another bachelor's degree in communication speech disorders. He's now in the master's program for speech language pathology at Utah State University while he works as a speech language technician at Horace Mann Elementary in Ogden.
His friends started families and pursued careers. His brother became a podiatrist, Hanson a firefighter, Kippen a pilot, and Norseth a lawyer. They've been inspired and amazed by Rich's accomplishments.
"He can't use his fingers, but he has a bachelor's in English...The determination it took for him to accomplish that is incredible," said Hanson.
"I think he was the strongest of the bunch of us," Kippen added. "He taught us all something about dealing with what you're given and making the most of it."
'A dream come true' • The last missing piece, his friends felt, was finding someone to share Rich's life.
Their prayers were answered by Utahn Amy Terry, who was teaching in Alaska when she met Rich on an online dating site.
The two traded emails about their LDS faith, love of family and oddly shared affection for the offbeat movie "Friday."
Once Amy returned to Utah, they went on a first date. She had to ride in the back of Rich's van, which has no room for a passenger seat in the front.
He also had to be home by 9 p.m. because that's when health aides arrive to help him prepare for bed.
Both 32, they share a love for working with young children.
In July, he literally popped the question tying a ring to a doorway that sprung from the last page of a pop-up book. "I just love him," Amy said. "He's awesome."
Last month, the four friends who saved Rich's life stood by his side as groomsmen as he married Amy.
The wedding brought the friendship full circle, Dave McKenzie said. "It was just amazing to be there to experience that. It was like literally a dream come true."
"We're ready to start a new chapter, all five of us being happy and where we want to be," Kippen agreed.
Rich feels his fairy tale is happening right now. "I never ever thought," he said, "that life could be this good."
Twitter: @justiola
At a glance
In July of 1998 five friends were celebrating their high school graduation together in the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah when the unimaginable happenedRich McKenzie dived into a river and onto a hidden sandbar, becoming instantly paralyzed. His three friends and brother Pete Norseth, Chris Hanson, Steve Kippen and Dave McKenzie took emergency action. They carried Rich safely to shore using lifeguard training skills they'd developed and sheltered him from the sun with a makeshift tarp from their camp. Five hours away from their car and hours away from a hospital, they were able to reach life flight on an emergency cell phone their parents had made them take on the trip. They say it was a miracle that they were able to find cell service while in the middle of the desert wilderness.
Fourteen years after the crisis that changed all of their lives, Rick McKenzie was married to Amy Terry, bringing the friends together once again in a celebration of their friendship and the close bond that they share because of what happened that day many years ago.


text:
Stanley Kubrick has long been one of my favorite directors; though 2001 was his only film that I'd seen.
So recently I decided to go through most of Kubrick's famous stuff.
I've seen "Paths of Glory", "Spartacus", "2001" and "The Shining". I have yet to see Dr.Strangelove. I'll probably pass "A clockwork orange" as it seems too dark and unpleasant kind of a film for me.
I loved "2001" of course.
Also liked "Paths of Glory" a lot.
"Spartacus" I have mixed feelings about. At times it feels too drawn out and stretched, though the cinematography and art-direction is spot on.
'The Shining' is his only film I didn't much cared for. I found the film memorable for only two reasons; the score was incredibly creepy, and the atmosphere-build up to create that sense of isolation. But as a horror film, it failed - as in to scare me even a little (besides the occasional eeriness of the score).